Preface
All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty, for it has been
my conviction that while each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity, in the final
analysis all sciences and disciplines of human action are interrelated and can be integrated
into a science or discipline of individual liberty.
In particular, my Man Economy and State, two volumes, 1962, set forth a comprehensive analysis
of the free market economy, while the analysis was praxeologic and value free and no political
conclusions were directly upheld.
The great virtues of the free market and the evils of coercive intervention into that market
were evident to the discerning reader.
The sequel to that work, Power and Market, 1970, carried the analysis of man, economy
and state further in several ways.
A, a systematic analysis of the types of government intervention in the economy clearly shows
the myriad of unfortunate consequences of such intervention.
B, for the first time in modern political-economic literature, a model was outlined of the way
The way in which a totally stateless and therefore purely free or anarchistic market economy
could function successfully.
And c.
A praxeological and therefore still value-free critique was conducted of the lack of meaningfulness
and consistency of various types of ethical attacks on the free market.
The latter section moved from pure economics to ethical criticism, but it remained within
in the Bounds of Value-Freedom and thus did not attempt a positive ethical theory of individual
liberty.
Yet I was conscious that the latter task needed almost desperately to be done, for, as will
be seen further in this work, I at no time believed that value-free analysis or economics
or utilitarianism, the standard social philosophy of economists, can ever suffice to establish
to establish the case for liberty.
Economics can help supply much of the data for a libertarian position, but it cannot
establish that political philosophy itself.
Political judgments are necessarily value judgments.
Political philosophy is therefore necessarily ethical, and hence a positive ethical system
must be set forth to establish the case for individual liberty.
It was furthermore clear to me that no one was engaged in trying to fill this crying need.
For one thing, until very recently in this century, there have been virtually no libertarian
political philosophers, and even in the far more libertarian 19th century, only Herbert
Spencer's great Social Statics, 1851, set forth a thorough and systematic theory of liberty.
In For a New Liberty, 1973, I was able for the first time to put forward at least the
brief outlines of my theory of liberty, and also to expound and defend the anarcho-capitalist
political creed far more substantially than in power and market.
But For a New Liberty was more popular than scholarly, and it concentrated mainly on the
application of the libertarian creed to the important social and economic problem areas
in American Society, the great need for a systematic theory of liberty still remained.
The present work attempts to fill this gap, to set forth a systematic ethical theory of
liberty. It is not, however, a work in ethics per se, but only in that subset of ethics
devoted to political philosophy. Hence it does not try to prove or establish the ethics
Part Two is the substance of the work itself, setting forth my theory of liberty.
It begins, as the best economic treatises have done, with a Crusoe world, except that
the condition and actions of Crusoe are here analyzed not in order to establish economic
concepts, but rather those of natural rights morality, in particular of the natural sphere
of property and ownership, the foundation of liberty.
The Crusoe model enables one to analyze the action of man vis-à-vis the external world
The Key to the Theory of Liberty is the establishment of the rights of private property.
For each individual's justified sphere of free action can only be set forth if his rights
of property are analyzed and established.
Crime can then be defined and properly analyzed as a violent invasion or aggression against
the just property of another individual, including his property and his own person.
The positive theory of liberty then becomes an analysis of what can be considered property
rights, and therefore what can be considered crimes.
Various difficult but vitally important problems can then be dissected, including the rights
of children, the proper theory of contracts as transfers of property titles, the thorny
Many Questions of Enforcement and Punishment, and Many Others.
Since questions of property and crime are essentially legal questions, our theory of
liberty necessarily sets forth an ethical theory of what law concretely should be.
In short, as a natural law theory should properly do, it sets forth a normative theory of law.
In our case, a theory of libertarian law.
While the book establishes the general outlines of a system of libertarian law, however,
it is only an outline, a prolegomenon to what I hope will be a fully developed libertarian
law code of the future.
Hopefully libertarian jurists and legal theorists will arise to hammer out the system of libertarian
law in detail, for such a law code will be necessary to the truly successful functioning
of what we may hope will be the libertarian society of the future.
The focus of this work is on the positive ethical theory of liberty and of the outlines
of libertarian law.
For such a discussion, there is no need for a detailed analysis or critique of the state.
Part 3 briefly sets forth my view of the state as the inherent enemy of liberty, and indeed
of genuine law.
Part 4 deals with the most important modern theories which attempt to establish a political
philosophy of liberty, in particular those of Mises, Hayek, Berlin and Nozick.
I do not attempt to review their works in detail, but rather to concentrate on why I
think their theories fail at the task of establishing an ideology of liberty.
Finally, Part 5 attempts the virtually pioneering task of beginning to set forth a theory of
of strategy of how to move from the present system to a world of liberty, and also my
reasons for being highly optimistic about the long run and even short run prospects
for the achievement of the noble ideal of a libertarian society, particularly in America.